I didn't mean to cause a stir or make anyone feel bad about this. I just think sometimes it's easy to take sites like JD for granted. I personally get a lot out of the site - networking, new information and pictures, a place to share my ridiculous ideas and opinions. There aren't a lot of people I know outside of the site that remotely understand my SW collecting, so just building that community here is pretty important to me. The handful of guys making all that possible don't ever ask for handouts or gripe about the cost and effort, so that makes it really easy to forget that someone is in the back room making all this possible. I've volunteered for enough thankless jobs in my life to know most people have no idea what kind of time and effort goes into making a process or a team or a website actually work and sustain itself.
So, whenever I see links pop up for stuff I'd consider ordering online, that's a great reminder for me to support the site. I'm not going to order if it's not something I want, but if it's a fair deal and something I intend to get anyway, then why not help out JD while you're helping yourself? And yeah, you could probably shop around and find a way to save $5 or $10 bucks. I look at like this though - I probably wouldn't have known to order it without the site, so technically the sponsored links are saving me money on something I would have had to drive all over to find or hunt down later on Ebay. If the site went away (and I'm pretty sure it would if no one ever bought through sponsors), then I'd probably end up paying a lot more and enjoying the hobby a lot less. From that perspective, an extra $5-10 here and there feels like a pretty good investment to me.
If you want more rationale or maybe don't like the sponsors, then look at it like this: If you spend an extra $5 and JD gets $15, the sponsor gets another sale, but for $15 less than they normally would have. Your little bit extra means the sponsor is mostly funding JD, not us. If JD had to crowd source, you'd probably have to pay the $5 or more and 100% of the funding would have to come from us users versus making the sponsors pay the majority. You guys that don't like EE should delight in the fact that you're cutting into their profits.
Anyway, the point was not to call anyone out, but rather to bring awareness to an issue that's easy to overlook without a reminder or an explanation every now and then. Carry on. Can't wait to see the Tusken and DS Trooper from this wave!